The mid seventeenth century collapse of Iroquoian Ontario:

M. JackeS
362
Others were still in Neutral land in 1641 (JR, 21, p. 231), although three hundred warriors and
their families were in Huronia in 1643 (JR, 26, p. 273). The Seneca continued to attack villages
east of the Niagara River (see e.g. Pendergast, 1994) and later still, Huron and Petun fled to
Neutralia, as we will see.
Famine
Besides war, there was famine. The lives of the Neutral were not always easier than those
of their more northerly neighbours. In a letter from environmentally more marginal Huronia,
dated 27 April 1639, it is reported that “The famine this year is rather serious; but it is worse
in the Neutral nation, where the children are sold like slaves in order to procure corn” (JR, 15,
p. 157). In the spring of 1640, it was stated that Neutral men, women and children fled starving
to the Petun, where many died (JR, 20, p. 47, 49). In 1643, the Jesuits recorded general
famine, not just among the Huron, but among all the neighbouring groups, with people
subsisting on acorns and roots. This was a period of exceptionally harsh winters. In 1640,
there were volcanic eruptions in Hokkaido, Japan (Komagatake) and in Ecuador (Tungurahua),
followed in 1641 by that of Mt Parker in Mindanao, Philippine Islands, no doubt contributing
to the devastatingly cold winters and cool summers 12 .
Would famine hit women and children particularly hard, while the men were away,
hunting, fishing, trading and on war parties? Were the males less likely to receive burial,
having died away from home or from freezing, drowning or by violence (categories of deaths
excluded from Huron ossuary pits)? Both are possible explanations for unbalanced sex ratios,
and these possibilities are, in fact, suggested by what we know of the Huron ethnohistorically.
However, such marked disparity of sex and age as we see at Grimsby for bead phase IIIa
is not paralleled in Huron ossuaries.
Women and children refugees are the most likely explanation for the Grimsby IIIa burials.
The only other explanation is that women and children were buried separately from adult
males, and that the bead phases are not, in fact, completely sequential temporally, an idea
explored previously (Jackes, 1996, p. 138). The method now put in place allows us to see that
the combined IIIa + IIIb sample TFR of 13-14 is outside the bounds of possibility, as is the TFR
of all three bead phases combined. Even if there is some overlap of bead phases so that some
of the IIIa features actually belong to earlier or later phases, as suggested by Fitzgerald (1983),
it is impossible to explain the middle phase of the Grimsby cemetery without proposing an
influx of women and children.
Schneider (1988, p. 167) has shown that nutritional deficiencies occurred during the 1640s
and that children buried in Feature 1, indeed, suffered “periods of real nutritional stress”.
12. E.g. Lamb, 1977; Briffa et al., 1998; Ruiz et al., 2006. The Ecuadorian volcano would have had an effect
upon the Northern Hemisphere: De Silva and Zielinski (1998) document global consequences, including
three years of cold summers in Quebec, following a 1600 eruption in Peru. The effects of East Asian
eruptions can be deduced from a recent Philippino eruption, see e.g. Lockwood (2001).